Sharing Music On Facebook With Spotify, Rdio Sounds Cool, Isn’t Yet

I thought being able to autonomously ‘tweet’ what song was playing on my computer to Facebook was pretty cool enough, but today Facebook unveiled music sharing. It was a feature they unveiled back at f8 in September, but is just now rolling into homes, much the same way Timeline is. But how awesome is it? Hrm…

The premise of this new music sharing feature is pretty simple: you see a friend listening to music in the Facebook ticker, you click on the little Note next to it, and it syncs your player to what they’re playing. In the process, it creates a new group chat (with up to 50 listeners) and one person acts as the DJ. But there are three big issues with it:

This is actually very similar to how Turntable.fm works, except you can’t have multiple DJs. You’re subjected to one person’s feed and theirs only, you can’t share your feed back to them. On top of that, it also lacks that site’s game-ification, the ability to upload your own music, and charming personality.

You can’t play tracks cross-player. If I see that Kelly is playing music through the very similar Rdio service when I have Spotify, I can’t listen to that track without installing Rdio and getting a compatible subscription plan (which I believe is free, thankfully.) Since these services carry a lot of the same music, I don’t really see how they can’t just cross-tag music to make compatibility like that possible. Which leads to my next problem:

None of my friends use these services in the same way I do. Oh sure, many of them use it, but none of them use Spotify at the exact same time that I do while I’m interested in opening my music library.

There’s a lot of potential for this, but they really should just buy Turntable.fm and call it a day.